


The Bystander At Culmination Park

by mc776



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Genocide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27342397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mc776/pseuds/mc776
Summary: From the perspective of old bent Garry Oak.
Relationships: James Amber/Sera Gearhardt, Rachel Amber/Chloe Price
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	The Bystander At Culmination Park

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Angel of Babylon](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26954533) by [mc776](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mc776/pseuds/mc776). 



> This was prompted by a friend's musings on what it would be like to write a narrative from the perspective of a sentient tree, taking seriously what a tree might be able to sense with its roots and leaves and other non-animal parts. I was struggling to think of a scenario for the narrative to take place in, while at the same time I was writing Chapter 4 of AoB, so I decided to use that as my prompt. This story should work on its own, however, even if you know nothing about the Life Is Strange games.
> 
> Nonetheless, I hope what's going on is clear enough that it's worth waiting until after I'd posted Chapter 4 before posting this. So, that said: **SPOILER ALERT** for both AoB and BtS.
> 
> Obviously significant artistic liberties were taken since I'm pretty sure white oaks don't have the power to process information at a time scale that would let it listen in on a human conversation, if it even could detect such fine air vibrations to be able to gather the input.
> 
> Anyway, [bonus link.](https://mastodon.online/@a_lizard/105134545229312766)

It stood in idle contemplation, feeling the bubbling murmurs of the network of grass and herb and assorted crawlers that ran through the ground by its trunk. Its only neighbours of any significant size were always a ways off, so it only caught the faintest of mumbles from them usually. Today one of them was a bit clearer, griping about some fresh wound it had taken under the blade of a pair of twofoots. It wondered why they did that - they never seemed to feed on the sap, and the cuts formed patterns that had nothing to do with efficiently removing sap or bark or bugs.

The days were already getting quite short, and the erratic touches of the tiny flyers was nowhere to be felt today. The stinging and scuttling of the tiny crawlers had also wound down significantly, though many remained under its skin; _tap, tap-tap... tap!_ went the big flyers as they flitted about its branches in search of those remaining.

It enjoyed the quiet still of this day, free of the strange and chaotic drama of the fourfoots. The large hard ones were always an irritant with their sharp stomping and gnawing on everything they could reach; the smaller soft ones gnawed as well, though for the most part they were content with dropped nuts and old twigs. The twofoots often brought soft medium-sized ones that did not gnaw, but often left rancid gifts that stank until they rotted into the soil many days later. These latter ones it actively disliked, and wondered at the stark contrast between them and a similar creature that only appeared at night, never came with the twofoots, and filled the crisp cold air with their haunting harmonies, a cold ekphrasis of the bleached light of the moon.

It thought of herbs, but really its neighbours these days were mostly just grass and clover and a few dandelions. Fungus it never really liked to associate with, though it supposed it wasn't being all that fair when it had fungus in its own roots. The neighbourhood had been livelier many years ago, but much was fading and the fire only made it worse.

Every time it thought too hard about the changes it had noticed in the twofoots over the years, it wondered if the earth was dying.

They seemed to change in phases, like the seasons but longer and more erratic. The first ones when it was young tended to it regularly, coming often throughout the year, often in elaborate ordered formations and synchronized movements. They were the ones who bent it in its youth, causing it to grow in directions the significance of which were only known to themselves. Their speech seemed to deal in abstract things that it could not hear or feel nor smell in anything nearby, as none of it seemed to correspond to anything present, and it only learned a vanishingly tiny bit of their vocabulary and curiously meandering yet geometric grammar.

The second group of twofoots were much harder in their steps, and only passed by briefly. When they came there were occasional fires that spun out of control. There was anger and violence and predation, like when some of the great nests of the branching gnawing crawlers would fight amongst themselves. Their speech was different, and their words much more likely to correspond to objects around them, but it did not know if they were actually more like in mind to the fourfoots or if it was only because they were attacking and needed to tell each other where to go.

And then for a while there were no twofoots.

A few dozen winters ago there was a great amount of digging and hammering far away from it. A third wave of the harder twofoots approached it and touched it in all sorts of ways with little things of wood and metal before departing. A great number of neighbours were uprooted and taken away, the destroyed soil planted with others of strange manner of thought and dress. It disliked them at first, and many of them died and left unfamiliar crawlers that were a nightmare to live with for years, but it seemed that after a while the twofoots eventually learned to meddle in ways that did not cause quite as much death and chaos. Many strange objects of stone and metal were placed in and on the dirt, without any apparent regard for the herbs and crawlers or fourfoot-trails already there, though some patterns bore a fleeting semblance to the dances and carved skeleton-arrangements of the first twofoots. And then many twofoots began wandering about, appearing regularly over the months but with no particular formation or order beyond two or three or four individuals. Some of them spoke to it, others ignored it, some cut strange patterns into its skin. It suspected that they were being planted and removed the same way as all those strange herbs had been.

And so a new semblance of harmony continued like this until the fire destroyed everything.

A pair of twofoots had appeared earlier that day. They had smelled like a mating pair, but they arrived separately and only interacted for a minute before the later arrival departed again. Shortly afterwards the first one, which also smelled of burned corpses of the sort sometimes brought by the original twofoots, departed as well.

This first pair stuck out in its mind primarily because they both smelled like one of the next pair that followed hours later, both of whom smelled also of old fungus-ridden rot and burned corpses. It was too old to be truly afraid of much, but these two, showing up at night and reeking of death, it could not understand as anything but a truly ill omen. It listened to them talk in hushed, angry, sad voices, as it smelled salt and felt erratic footsteps, then something like burned dung as one of the metal structures caught fire.

Its last memory was being engulfed in fire and pierced by a horrifying scream.

It did not know how many winters it must have withdrawn its consciousness. Perhaps none; perhaps a thousand. When it awoke it was spring and all of its friends were dead, the strange structures were broken, and the place was overrun with young herbs and fourfoots of every size and hardness with no twofoots to be found. It made new friends and conversed, and told the newcomers some of its stories about those who had been here before.

It hid its sadness when it knew that even this would not last.

Not even a single summer passed before the twofoots came again. There was a similar great cutting and uprooting as before, but the disruption was not quite the same as it had been the first time; it supposed that perhaps they still remembered their previous lessons. For a brief while the random wandering twofoots and their poop-happy fourfoot symbiotes came again, but soon they disappeared once more, and it felt and learned from its new neighbours that more of the digging and object-planting was happening sporadically elsewhere in the forest beyond.

This evening another pair of sad, angry twofoots showed up.

When the first one arrived it thought it was one of the digger-planters. It sat right up against it for a long time (not an uncommon behaviour), smelling of old dried animal juice (somewhat more uncommon), then moved about on its contraption and started placing some kind of long flexible object on it. It could not identify the object: at first it supposed the thing to be an extremely large crawler that the twofoot had hunted for food, but the smell was all very wrong.

Then the second one came into range, smelling faintly of strange chemicals. The shouting began confused and afraid, then angry and sad, then angrier and more afraid, and then suddenly there was a flurry of stomping and slithering and rolling as the twofoots cried out muffled shouts while attacking each other.

And then the clover began screaming as it was being rapidly torn to pieces by a small and very fast fourfoot that had appeared in the chaos.

After a while the twofoots stopped and lay there twitching for some time. It smelled salt again. They then got up, took the fourfoot (and tore out even more clover with them, apparently to sate its ravenous appetite) and picked up the various mysterious objects they had brought with them.

Not for a long time had it felt such relief that a twofoot was finally leaving.

The clover was fine; its body would grow back in time along with its dignity.

As the twofoots and their symbiote went out of range it noticed a hard fourfoot nearby, seeming to follow the twofoots from afar. This took a while before, satisfied, it left.

The grass said they did not feel or smell this hard fourfoot at all. It remembered that _she_ was like that sometimes, coming in and out of existence at whim all these hundreds of winters.


End file.
